GOTHAM represents an ambitious research programme to gain robust, relevant and transferable knowledge of past and present day patterns and trends of regional climate extremes and variability of vulnerable areas identified by the IPCC, including the tropics and high-latitudes. It will achieve this by identifying the influence of remote drivers, or teleconnections, on regional climate variability, and assessing their relative impact.[more]

Work package 2: Impacts of dominant air-sea interaction modes on the variability of extreme climate events over East Asia (lead by B. Wu)

Workpackage 2 will first explore how air-sea interaction modes modulate extreme events in East Asia through teleconnection patterns. These modes include ENSO and IOBM on annual timescales and Interdecadal Pacific oscillation (IPO) and Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation (AMO) on decadal timescales. High temporal and spatial resolution observational/reanalysis data will be analyzed and idealized numerical experiments will be conducted using a hierarchy of different complexity climate models. We will use climate prediction experiments to assess variations in these air-sea interaction modes and estimate predictability of extreme events based upon their statistical relationships with these modes.